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This paper provides an in-depth review and discussion of the state of the art in redundancy mitigation for the vehicular Collective Perception Service (CPS). We focus on the evolutionary differences between the redundancy mitigation rules proposed in 2019 in ETSI TR 103 562 versus the 2023 technical specification ETSI TS 103 324, which uses a Value of Information (VoI) based mitigation approach. We also critically analyse the academic literature that has sought to quantify the communication challenges posed by the CPS and present a unique taxonomy of the redundancy mitigation approaches proposed using three distinct classifications: object inclusion filtering, data format optimisation, and frequency management. Finally, this paper identifies open research challenges that must be adequately investigated to satisfactorily deploy CPS redundancy mitigation measures. Our critical and comprehensive evaluation serves as a point of reference for those undertaking research in this area.

Semantic Communication (SEM-COM) has emerged as one of the disruptive technologies facilitating the evolution towards sixth-generation (6G) wireless networks. This article presents the potential of SEM-COM to transform Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communications, with a particular emphasis on its ability to enhance communication efficiency and intelligence. We discuss the core components and metrics that characterize SEM-COM, providing insights into its operational framework within the context of V2X communications. We illustrate the applicability and practicality of SEM-COM through real-world vehicular use cases, demonstrate the potential of SEM-COM to enhance aspects of intelligent mobility, such as communication efficiency and decision-making. Finally, the article identifies key open research questions for SEM-COM V2X, pointing to areas that require further exploration and thus setting a foundation for future work in this evolving domain., Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures

Time-sensitive networking (TSN) is expected to be a key component of critical machine-type communication networks in areas such as Industry 4.0, robotics and autonomous vehicles. With rising mobility requirements in industrial applications and the prevalence of wireless networks, wireless network integration into TSN is becoming increasingly important. This survey article presents a comprehensive review of the current literature on wireless TSN, including an overview of the architecture of a wireless TSN network and an examination of the various wireless technologies and protocols that can be or are used in such networks. In addition, the article discusses industrial applications of wireless TSN, among them industrial automation, robotics, and autonomous vehicles. The article concludes by summarizing the challenges and open issues related to the integration of TSN into wireless networks, and by offering suggestions for future research directions.

This paper explores the role that 5G, WiFi-7, and Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) can play in driving smart manufacturing as a fundamental part of the Industry 4.0 vision. The paper provides an in-depth analysis of each technology's application in industrial communications, with a focus on TSN and its key elements that enable reliable and secure communication in industrial networks. In addition, the paper includes a comparative study of these technologies, analyzing them based on a number of industrial use-cases, supported secondary applications, industry adoption, and current market trends. The paper concludes by highlighting the challenges and future directions for the adoption of these technologies in industrial networks and emphasizes their importance in realizing the Industry 4.0 vision within the context of smart manufacturing.

Smart manufacturing is a vision and major driver for change in industrial environments. The goal of smart manufacturing is to optimize manufacturing processes through constantly monitoring and adapting processes towards more efficient and personalised manufacturing. This requires and relies on technologies for connected machines incorporating a variety of computation, sensing, actuation, and machine to machine communications modalities. As such, understanding the change towards smart manufacturing requires knowledge of the enabling technologies, their applications in real world scenarios and the communications protocols that they rely on. This paper presents an extensive review of wireless machine to machine communication protocols currently applied in manufacturing environments and provides a comprehensive review of the associated use cases whilst defining their expected impact on the future of smart manufacturing. Based on the review, we point out a number of open challenges and directions for future research., Comment: The manuscript has been submitted to IEEE for possible publication

Industry 5.0 envisions close cooperation between humans and machines requiring ultra-reliable and low latency communications (URLLC). The Intelligent Reflecting Surface (IRS) has the potential to play a crucial role in realizing wireless URLLC for Industry 5.0. IRS is forecast to be a key enabler of 6G wireless communication networks as it can significantly improve wireless network performance by creating a controllable radio environment. In this paper, we first provide an overview of IRS technology and then conceptualize the potential for IRS implementation in a future smart manufacturing environment to support the emergence of Industry 5.0 with a series of applications. Finally, to stimulate future research in this area, we discuss the strength, open challenges, and opportunities of IRS technology in modern smart manufacturing., Comment: Accepted in IEEE Communications Magazine

In the last decade, the advancement of the Internet of Things (IoT) has caused unlicensed radio spectrum, especially the 2.4 GHz ISM band, to be immensely crowded with smart wireless devices that are used in a wide range of application domains. Due to their diversity in radio resource use and channel access techniques, when collocated, these wireless devices create interference with each other, known as Cross-Technology Interference (CTI), which can lead to increased packet losses and energy consumption. CTI is a significant problem for low-power wireless networks, such as IEEE 802.15.4, as it decreases the overall dependability of the wireless network. To improve the performance of low-power wireless networks under CTI conditions, we propose a data-driven proactive receiver-aware MAC protocol, LUCID, based on interference estimation and white space prediction. We leverage statistical analysis of real-world traces from two indoor environments characterised by varying channel conditions to develop CTI prediction methods. The CTI models that generate accurate predictions of interference behaviour are an intrinsic part of our solution. LUCID is thoroughly evaluated in realistic simulations and we show that depending on the application data rate and the network size, our solution achieves higher dependability, 1.2% increase in packet delivery ratio and 0.02% decrease in duty-cycle under bursty indoor interference than state of the art alternative methods., Comment: 22 pages, 19 figures, 6 tables

We are on the cusp of a new era of connected autonomous vehicles with unprecedented user experiences, tremendously improved road safety and air quality, highly diverse transportation environments and use cases, as well as a plethora of advanced applications. Realizing this grand vision requires a significantly enhanced vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication network which should be extremely intelligent and capable of concurrently supporting hyper-fast, ultra-reliable, and low-latency massive information exchange. It is anticipated that the sixth-generation (6G) communication systems will fulfill these requirements of the next-generation V2X. In this article, we outline a series of key enabling technologies from a range of domains, such as new materials, algorithms, and system architectures. Aiming for truly intelligent transportation systems, we envision that machine learning will play an instrumental role for advanced vehicular communication and networking. To this end, we provide an overview on the recent advances of machine learning in 6G vehicular networks. To stimulate future research in this area, we discuss the strength, open challenges, maturity, and enhancing areas of these technologies.

This paper is concerned with the key features and fundamental technology components for 5G New Radio (NR) for genuine realization of connected and cooperative autonomous driving. We discuss the major functionalities of physical layer, Sidelink features and its resource allocation, architecture flexibility, security and privacy mechanisms, and precise positioning techniques with an evolution path from existing cellular vehicle-to-everything (V2X) technology towards NR-V2X. Moreover, we envisage and highlight the potential of machine learning for further enhancement of various NR-V2X services. Lastly, we show how 5G NR can be configured to support advanced V2X use cases in autonomous driving.

Embedded software management requirements due to concerns about security vulnerabilities or for feature updates in the Internet of Things (IoT) deployments have raised the need for Firmware Update Over The Air (FUOTA). With FUOTA's support, security updates, new functionalities, and optimization patches can be deployed with little human intervention to embedded devices over their lifetime. However, supporting FUTOA over one of the most promising IoT networking technologies, LoRaWAN, is not a straightforward task due to LoRaWAN's limitations that do not provide for data bulk transfer such as a firmware image. Therefore, the LoRa Alliance has proposed new specifications to support multicast, fragmentation, and clock synchronization, which are essential features to enable efficient FUOTA in LoRaWAN. In this paper, we review these new specifications and evaluate the FUOTA process in order to quantify the impact of the different FUOTA parameters in terms of the firmware update time, the device's energy consumption, and the firmware update efficiency, showing different trade-offs among the parameters. For this, we developed FUOTASim, a simulation tool that allows us to determine the best FUOTA parameters.

LoRaWAN promises to provide wide-area network access to low-cost devices that can operate for up to 10 years on a single 1000 mAh battery. This makes LoRaWAN particularly suited to data collection applications (e.g. monitoring applications), where device lifetime is a key performance metric. However, when supporting a large number of devices, LoRaWAN suffers from a scalability issue due to the high collision probability of its Aloha-based MAC layer. The performance worsens further when using acknowledged transmissions due to the duty cycle restriction at the gateway. For this, we propose FREE, a fine-grained scheduling scheme for reliable and energy-efficient data collection in LoRaWAN. FREE takes advantage of applications that do not have hard delay requirements on data delivery by supporting synchronized bulk data transmission. This means data is buffered for transmission in scheduled time slots instead of transmitted straight away. FREE allocates spreading factors, transmission powers, frequency channels, time slots, and schedules slots in frames for LoRaWAN end-devices. As a result, FREE overcomes the scalability problem of LoRaWAN by eliminating collisions and grouping acknowledgments. We evaluate the performance of FREE versus different legacy LoRaWAN configurations. The numerical results show that FREE scales well and achieves almost 100% data delivery and the device lifetime is estimated to over 10 years independent of traffic type and network size. Comparing to poor scalability, low data delivery and device lifetime of fewer than 2 years for acknowledged data traffic in the standard LoRaWAN configurations., Comment: 16 pages, 8 figures, 5 tables, and 2 algorithms

In this paper, we present results of a study of the data rate fairness among nodes within a LoRaWAN cell. Since LoRa/LoRaWAN supports various data rates, we firstly derive the fairest ratios of deploying each data rate within a cell for a fair collision probability. LoRa/LoRaWAN, like other frequency modulation based radio interfaces, exhibits the \textit{capture effect} in which only the stronger signal of colliding signals will be extracted. This leads to unfairness, where far nodes or nodes experiencing higher attenuation are less likely to see their packets received correctly. Therefore, we secondly develop a transmission power control algorithm to balance the received signal powers from all nodes regardless of their distances from the gateway for a fair data extraction. Simulations show that our approach achieves higher fairness in data rate than the state-of-art in almost all network configurations., Comment: 9 pages, 7 figures, 1 algorithm, submitted to WoWMoM 2018

LoRaWAN exhibits several characteristics that can lead to an unfair distribution of the Data Extracted Rate (DER) among nodes. Firstly, the capture effect leads to a strong signal suppressing a weaker signal at the gateway and secondly, the spreading codes used are not perfectly orthogonal, causing packet loss if an interfering signal is strong enough. In these conditions, nodes experiencing higher attenuation are less likely to see their packets received correctly. We develop FADR, a Fair Adaptive Data Rate algorithm for LoRaWAN that exploits the different Spreading Factors (SFs) and Transmission Powers (TPs) settings available in LoRa to achieve a fair Data Extraction Rate among all nodes while at the same time avoiding excessively high TPs. Simulations show that FADR, in highly congested cells, achieves 300% higher fairness than the minimum airtime allocation approach and 22% higher fairness than Brechts approach, while consuming almost 22% lower energy., Comment: 2 pages, 6 figures and 1 algorithm

Cross Technology Interference (CTI) is a prevalent phenomenon in the 2.4 GHz unlicensed spectrum causing packet losses and increased channel contention. In particular, WiFi interference is a severe problem for low-power wireless networks as its presence causes a significant degradation of the overall performance. In this paper, we propose a proactive approach based on WiFi interference modeling for accurately predicting transmission opportunities for low-power wireless networks. We leverage statistical analysis of real-world WiFi traces to learn aggregated traffic characteristics in terms of Inter-Arrival Time (IAT) that, once captured into a specific 2nd order Markov Modulated Poisson Process (MMPP(2)) model, enable accurate estimation of interference. We further use a hidden Markov model (HMM) for channel occupancy prediction. We evaluated the performance of i) the MMPP(2) traffic model w.r.t. real-world traces and an existing Pareto model for accurately characterizing the WiFi traffic and, ii) compared the HMM based white space prediction to random channel access. We report encouraging results for using interference modeling for white space prediction., Comment: This is the extended version of the paper "Modeling WiFi Traffic for White Space Prediction in Wireless Sensor Networks" accepted for publication at the 42nd IEEE Conference on Local Computer Networks (LCN), October 9-12, 2017, Singapore. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses

Supporting IPv6/UDP/CoAP protocols over Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWANs) can bring open networking, interconnection, and cooperation to this new type of Internet of Things networks. However, accommodating these protocols over these very low bandwidth networks requires efficient header compression schemes to meet the limited frame size of these networks, where only one or two octets are available to transmit all headers. Recently, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) LPWAN working group drafted the Static Context Header Compression (SCHC), a new header compression scheme for LPWANs, which can provide a good compression factor without complex synchronization. In this paper, we present an implementation and evaluation of SCHC. We compare SCHC with IPHC, which also targets constrained networks. Additionally, we propose an enhancement of SCHC, Layered SCHC (LSCHC). LSCHC is a layered context that reduces memory consumption and processing complexity, and adds flexibility when compressing packets. Finally, we perform calculations to show the impact of SCHC/LSCHC on an example LPWAN technology, e.g. LoRaWAN, from the point of view of transmission time and reliability., Comment: 6 pages, 8 figures, accepted fir publication in CHANTS workshop in ACM MobiCom